[Chloe Rodriguez]: Midterm Portfolio – #3 Creative Captions
The Project
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Project Description
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Documentation
I decided to do the Cindy Goes to a Party video because I thought it was silly and I love old etiquette videos. The first thing I did was to create the captions and then go through and check that the captions were correct. At the point, I was also inserting the names of who was speaking. This process is actually very time consuming. There weren’t too many mistakes but the ones that were there were incredibly random. Also, sometimes it was difficult to even understand what they were saying in the video due to the bad quality. Another issue I came across at this stage was the whole transatlantic accent thing. Often, the fairy godmother character in the film begins her lines by saying “why” which led to many questions about the proper way to write the captions in terms of grammatical correctness. I tried to run the lines through Grammarly software (which I generally dislike to begin with since it is not a very smart software) to see how it would adjust the lines and it would end the lines with question marks despite the lines not being questions. In the end, I just left the sentences as direct statements.
Once I was finished with this part of the process, I left this project to sit for about a week. In class when we looked at different examples of captioning, I really like the example of different colored captions for different characters, and some of the animated captions. When I reapproached the project, I wanted to change the colors of the captions. I chose pink for the Fairy Godmother, yellow for Cindy, blue for Dennis, and plain black and white for any unnamed voices and background noises. However, before I changed the colors of the text, I decided to upgrade the captions to graphics which wound up being a mistake. There were some clips with multiple speakers that I left as one piece of caption and when I went to change the colors, I discovered that you cannot change the colors of certain parts of the text. Luckily, I was able to add caption tracks to the parts and adjust the appearance so the tracks weren’t overlapping. Once I finished this part, I went for a four hour walk because I was sitting in one place for more than two hours.
When I came back to the project, I wanted to animate/add effects some of the Fairy Godmother’s lines. I knew that I wanted to put a glow effect on the text so I tried to add it. Unfortunately, the glow effect applies itself to the background of the text and not the text itself which looked really bad. So I removed the background of the text to see what the glow effect looked like then and it still looked really bad even after I adjusted all the settings to try and make it more appealing. I am really bad with animation so I knew that animating the text would be a long shot but I wanted to at least say that I tried. I knew I wanted to animate some of the magic wand sounds and the fairy godmother’s lines around these times. I tried to do the most basic fade in animation and it looked horrible so I immediately gave up those dreams.
Unfortunately, this wound up being less creative and more just captions but I like it. I have never worked with captioning and I had fun making it even if it is a bit plain.
Here is a link to the final version!
Reflection Questions
The video itself focuses on etiquette and social norms present in the 1950s; I like to think that my captions are a fun addition to this video which seems very silly in the modern day. The captioning modality is an interesting addition to a video of this topic because it can help ensure that even the hearing-impaired are able to access these lessons of etiquette. If I had been able to add a glow to the fairy godmother’s text I think that would emphasize her magical role but I do feel the color-coded captions as is draws attention to who is speaking and makes the educational aspect of the video shine. It was difficult to describe some of the children playing sounds in a way that was effective so I think those layers of nuance are lost. I tried to make the captions have a good contrast but it may be inaccessible for low vision viewers. To include these populations, I could add audio description or perhaps experiment a bit more with the colors to figure out what really works for low vision viewers.
Additional Modality (if applicable)
What modality did you apply?
How did you decide on this modality?
What does the beholder gain from this additional modality? Why?
Does the beholder lose anything from this modality? What?
Show documentation of this modality, and describe it if it’s not accessible on a screen (ie, if it’s tactile if it’s a scent)